This idea seems to have been proposed first by British physicist Geoffrey Dummer (born 1909) in a speech in May 1952. “I would like to take a peep into the future,” he said. With the advent of the transistor and the work in semiconductors generally, it seems now possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block with no connecting wires. The block may consist of layers of insulating, conducting, rectifying and amplifying materials, the electrical functions being connected directly by cutting out areas of the various layers.
